BitShares Blockchain-as-a-Service Now Available on Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Azure has become a focal point for digital currency enthusiasts and developers over the past few months, as they started adding various blockchain templates to their offering. Getting more people acquainted with distributed ledgers through their blockchain-as-a-service feature on Microsoft Azure is a great way to spur future innovation. The latest blockchain template to be added to this platform is BitShares.

BitShares Baas On Microsoft Azure

It has to be said, Microsoft is doing some pretty amazing things with their Azure service as of late. Allowing users to introduce blockchain-as-a-service templates is a great way to provide insights into how blockchains actually work, and what they are capable of. Moreover, this gives companies a sandboxed environment to experiment with distributed ledgers and see how they could impact the core business.

So far, there has been a lot of focus on the Ethereum BaaS feature, as this is one of the biggest milestones in the history of that project to date. But Microsoft Azure is looking at other options as well, and a new template has been made available to deploy BitShares on an Ubuntu 15.10 instance. This template can be found on this page, for those who are interested.

As one would come to expect from such a template, it will provide complete access to the BitShares network in a virtual machine. Installation of this BitShares template takes roughly 15 minutes, which is a lot faster than doing things manually. After all, Microsoft Azure is designed to handle these tasks quite easily.

Once the installation process has been completed, users will be able to get starting using the BitShares blockchain from the command line. Microsoft Azure users can choose between building from source, or installing the community-provided Personal Package Archive. Blockchain synchronization will start automatically once this step has been completed, and users can open a connecting to their virtual machine over SSH. Interfacing with the BitShares blockchain can be done through the “cli-wallet” command.

It is good to see more variety in the blockchain-as-a-service templates offering on Microsoft Azure. BitShares is an industrial-grade financial blockchain and smart contracts platform. But what is more important to financial institutions is how this blockchain solution can offer transaction speeds and volume similar to that of the NASDAQ platform.

About The Author

JP Buntinx is a FinTech and Bitcoin enthusiast living in Belgium. His passion for finance and technology made him one of the world's leading freelance Bitcoin writers, and he aims to achieve the same level of respect in the FinTech sector.